[uf-discuss] Microformats Community Mark

[Drew McLellan]

On 23 Jun 2006, at 02:32, brian suda wrote:

> Today on IRC[1], we talked briefly about the Microformats Logo and how
> it is setup to be a Community Mark. Tantek pointed to Chris Messina's
> original post about the idea of a community mark[2].
>
> I really do like the idea, it fits nicely with everything that we are
> doing here as a community, but i do have some reservations and
> questions. Hopefully, as a community we can help clarify what a
> "community mark" (cm) really is?

The recent brouhaha over the feed icon might be a good point of  
reference.

In short, Mozilla claimed they had some kind of right over the new  
'standard' feed icon - which they probably do - and have applied for  
a trade mark. This annoyed pretty much everyone, whom I believe  
really saw the icon as something more akin to what we call a CM.

The current state of play is Mozilla are trying to retrospectively Do  
The Right Thing and have come up with a set of usage guidelines that  
don't seem too restrictive (at a quick read):
http://www.hecker.org/mozilla/feed-icon-guidelines

Perhaps this sort of thing (guidelines, not trade marks) could work  
well for community marks. However, perhaps the guidelines should be  
open to annotation, and a formalised periodic review. So if lots of  
people annotated the same point to say "x doesn't work for me, could  
we change this to y?", then that change should be incorporated into a  
revision.

Real world example: the feed icon guidelines set a minimum icon size  
of 16 pixels square. I, and lots of others that I've seen, use the  
icon at sizes like 12x12. That would be a perfect point to mark on  
the guidelines requesting that a minimum size of 12x12 be considered,  
as the icon still works well at that size and offers designers a  
little more flexibility.

In the t-shirt example, where a stylised low-res monochrome version  
of the logo was used, Brian would need to annotate the "don't mess  
with the logo" point in the guidelines to say, hey, how about this  
suggested variation?


drew.